Flickr today unveiled a new homepage design which does away with the app’s traditional minimalist approach.
The new design brings far more copy than the page used to house in a clear attempt to win more users over. It’s possible that their departure from a low-copy frontpage corresponds with a plateau or drop in usage — minimalist homepages that don’t make much of an attempt to convert the user are generally a sign of confidence in a service’s popularity.
Also interesting is that despite longer copy, there’s absolutely no mention of video, suggesting Flickr has conceded defeat to services like YouTube and Vimeo.
As you’d expect the page still makes use of large photographs, but there’s a clean and modern layout using grey lines and sans-serif text selling users on the site’s main functions — upload, discover and share. There’s also more of a focus on single sign-on through Google and Facebook.
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Quick Pitch: Thinglink changes how people interact with photos by transforming them into a navigational surface for search, commerce, and social connection.
Genius Idea: Turning photos into interactive stories.
“Every image has a story,” says Ulla-Maaria Engeström. Engeström is the design blogger-turned-entrepreneur behind Thinglink, a Helsinki-based startup that makes image interaction tools. These tools help bloggers, photographers, bands, creatives and companies tell stories by tagging photos with music, people, places and products.
Thinglink’s image-tagging tool can be enabled on WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Drupal and Typepad sites. Users add a small snippet of code to their websites to enable Thinglink tagging. Then, they’ll be able to revisit photos to tag content with links, music tracks, Amazon products and even Twitter users.
The music piece is part of a recently inked partnership with SoundCloud. Users need only copy SoundCloud track URLs and paste them in the appropriate field to add music to their photos.
“Images and sounds make a natural and powerful combination. Both online and offline, they create inspiration and context for consumption,” Engeström writes on the SoundCloud integration. “We make decisions about what to buy, where to go and who to see, based on images. Music inspires fashion designers to create collections, and visual stories inspire those who make music.”
Thinglink for personal use, especially if for Tumblr or WordPress users, is an interesting experiment in image storytelling. Adding the required code is a simple exercise of copy-and-paste, and adding tags is merely a point-click-and-type process.
In testing, I tagged an image with a SoundCloud track and tagged my friends with their Twitter handles. In both cases, I simply pasted URLs into the “Link URL” field (as seen above). The original image simply showed two friends signing karaoke. The Thinglink tagged-photo became akin to an interactive story complete with music and context.
Professionals, retailers and publishers might find more business opportunities than storytelling in the image-tagging practice. Thinglink promises to help convert image viewers into product buyers. Atlantic Records, Paper Garden Records and Elle Magazine have each experimented with the startup’s image-tagging technology.
Thinglink has raised $1 million in funding from Nordic investors Inventure and Lifeline Ventures. The startup competes with companies such as Pixazza, GumGum, Stipple and Thingd in an ever-expanding image-tagging space that’s been slowly evolving for the past few years. These technologies have not yet become widely adopted by consumers or companies, although venture capitalists continue to make investments in the space.
Thinglink serves more than 30 million image views monthly for its clients.
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Our attention was drawn to the personal site of Bret Victor at WorryDream.com today by Gizmodo. We’re impressed.
This is a site built by the man who designed the original iPad and iPod touch interface, the interactive data graphics in Al Gore’s iPad book on climate change, engineered an analog-modeling synth, a train trip scheduler with an innovative UI and many more projects in Victor’s huge portfolio.
The site takes the newest technologies and pushes them to the edge to create a dynamic, interactive, always-moving site. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Victor is a man who thinks a lot about the newest concepts in interface design, as evidenced by his thoughts on dynamic pictures.
And some pages make the most of old technology to get a beautiful result. Take a look at his bio: it looks great, but it’s made of simple, static image files.
One thing that many will be surprised to learn: there’s no Flash involved. WorryDream joins sites like Agent 8 Ball that achieve things traditionally only possible with Flash on the back of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.
It’s not without its flaws. It can be a touch slow, and the interface wouldn’t exactly make Jakob Nielsen happy, but we don’t care: this site looks amazing, and such flaws are to be expected when it comes to highly experimental concepts.
If you’re interested in interface design and just how far current technology can be stretched, you’d do well to keep up to date with everything Victor does.
Fonts. Kerning. Color. Words. By themselves each choice might sound like a chore, but Letterpress, a very short appreciation by Naomie Ross, celebrates the subtle beauty and craftsmanship of printing on an intimate scale. [Naomie Ross via NotCot]More »
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